MAXIMum Controversy

What better way to launch a magazine than a controversy surrounding it? I hadn’t heard about MAXIM till Khushboo came out with a statement objecting to some morphed pictures in MAXIM India’s inaugural issue. The curiosity factor generated out of this issue would have probably resulted in more people buying the mag.

The publishers of Indian Maxim have clearly calculated that 20-something men in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad are just as puerile and inane as their counterparts in London, Birmingham and Manchester.

More curiously, they believe they have identified a new demographic: the Indian Lad. So who do they have in mind?

Apparently, a call centre employee who is earning more in his mid-20s than his father was being paid in his mid-40s; a young man with small-town roots but big-city ambitions.

A social climber keen to sample the best food, wine, clothes, movies and machines; an image-conscious trend-follower with enough disposable income to afford the latest gizmos and gadgets; a guy with his finger closely on the pulse and the latest mobile phone in his palm.

It is the personification of the new, metro-centric India.

I hope the Western world doesn’t get an impression that India is a land full of snake charmers at one end and call center employees at the other end.